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X Marks the Spot

Buy Any Means Necessary

When the townhouse at 244 West 139th Street last went on the market, in 1992, "I remember going there and seeing all of these boxes with the name Malik El-Shabazz, and I said, 'That's Malcolm X!' " says Harlem broker Willie Kathryn Suggs. "The brokers, who shall remain nameless, were throwing it out, and I had a cow." The four-story, 3,900-square-foot townhouse, where Malcolm X and the Black Muslims had kept offices in the early sixties, was being bought by a New York firefighter, who's just resold it for close to the asking price of $999,000. Much of the documentation did get tossed, but, says Suggs, "the brokers managed to overlook, thank God, two boxes of documents, which the owners have." Renovations added a marble shower room and a Sub-Zero fridge and double oven in the skylit kitchen. "The house will always be historic," says Suggs. "It's where Malcolm sat on the stoop, and, you know, pondered the future of mankind."